1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a scalable encoding apparatus and method and in particular, to a scalable encoding apparatus and method for performing fast compression without deteriorating image quality by performing fast motion prediction in an enhanced layer using motion information of a lower layer when performing scalable video coding providing various bitrates, among video data compression technologies.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, due to uncompressed digital data having a very large size, image signals to be transmitted and stored should be compressed. In other words, in order to minimize a bandwidth required to transmit digitally encoded video data, a video compression algorithm has been applied to the digitally encoded video data.
A video compression technology according to the related art compresses a large capacity of video data under the assumption that it provides a predetermined network bandwidth within a limited operational environment of hardware, but does not consider a flexible network environment.
Therefore, in order to compress the video data to be used under the network environment where the bandwidth frequently varies, a new compression technology is needed. A scalable video codec algorithm was developed in order to solve the above problem.
However, the scalable video codec, which is an extended codec based on currently and widely used H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), provides three different types of scalabilities associated with spatial, temporal, and image quality aspects; accordingly, the complexity is significantly increased. Therefore, the complexity should be lowered in order to be able to apply to various platform terminals or service applications.
As a result, the scalable video codec providing three scalabilities based on the complex algorithm of H264 essentially performs a significantly complex operation as compared to H.264. The complex video codec cannot perform user desired fast encoding upon processing general video signals. Therefore, a method for effectively fast encoding an algorithm without deteriorating image quality should be researched.